[jcgrillo]

I guess I'm thinking along the lines of analyzing processes for which I have some intuition what the frequency distribution should look like. Say I have a scheduled task running once per second which does some work, and I expect to see a corresponding cpu spike every second. But I notice that sometimes when the task runs it takes longer. Looking at the cpu spectrum I see a frequency spike at 1Hz corresponding to my 1/s task, but I also see a spike at 0.2Hz, confirming my suspicion that something is contending for cpu resources on every fifth task, slowing it down. Now I know to look for something that's happening every 5s.

In this contrived example I could have probably intuited that I was looking for something with a period of 5s without looking at the spectrum but maybe there are cases where it could be useful? I guess I'll just have to play around with data and find out :p.